crontab entry environment variables [PSARC/2007/503 FastTrack timeo

[Don Cragun]

Bill,
	I'm not sure what you mean.  The current knob in the spec is
essentially "enable POSIX non-compliance in all crontab files".  I'm
suggesting that that only be done as long as there are warnings in the
appropriate man pages that this "feature", if enabled, should not be
used in shared crontab files.
	I think the what you're suggesting is that non-compliance be
the default and have a knob to enable conformance.  No matter which way
the knob defaults, if you're going to allow use of this non-conforming
behavior on some systems, the man pages need to document that shared
crontabs (at least those that may be modified by POSIX conforming
applications) should not use these non-conforming extensions.
	I was trying to help by supplying what I though were simple
measures that would allow strictly conforming applications to continue
working correctly, unchanged even though non-shared crontab files are
using this new feature.  (No knob required.)
	As stated before, other ways of doing this are to have these
environment settings affect only the single following crontab entry.  I
suggested that long ago, but it was rejected.  John tried a different
suggestion this afternoon, but I haven't seen a response to that yet.
Either of these would allow strictly conforming applications to share
crontabs with users using the extension without affect the conforming
application behavior.  (Again, no knob required.)

 - Don

>Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2007 17:37:51 -0400
>From: Bill Sommerfeld <sommerfeld at sun.com>
>
>On Wed, 2007-09-12 at 14:17 -0700, Don Cragun wrote:
>> OK.  Now we're back to a standards conformance problem.
>> 
>> If you want to inflict unrequested changes in behavior on strictly
>> conforming POSIX applications that use crontab -e to add crontab
>> entries to the end of a crontab file; then you need a knob that enables
>> this extension only on individual crontab files at the request of the
>> owner of that crontab file.
>
>Why can't that compliance knob be "don't include lines which are syntax
>errors under the POSIX spec"?
>
>						- Bill